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that during the course of the day she would surely be able to convince
him that she must go. (She had noticed that the invocation of her father
inevitably moved him. "We mustn't do anything to upset your father,''
he would say. "He must be a very fine man." And tears would actually
come to his eyes. She would play that, she thought, for all it was worth.)
Yet her uneasiness did not abate. It was as if, carelessly, inadvertently,
almost, she had pulled a switch that had set a whole strange factory going,
and now, too late, she discovered that she did not know how to turn it off.
She could have run away, but some sense of guilt, of social responsibility,
of primitive awe, kept her glued to the spot, watching and listening, wait·
ing to be ground to bits. Once, in a beauty parlor, she had been put
under a defective dryer that remained on high no matter where she turned
the regulator; her neck seemed to be burning up, and she could, at any
time, have freed herself by simply getting out of the chair; yet she had
stayed there the full half hour, until the operator came to release her.
"I think," she had said then, lightly, "there is something wrong with the
machine." And when the operator had examined it, all the women had
gathered round, clucking, "How did you ever stand it?" She had merely
shrugged her shoulders. It had seemed, at the time, better to suffer than
to "make a fuss." Perhaps it was something like this that had held her to
the man today, the fear of a scene and a kind of morbid competitiveness
that would not allow the man to outdistance her in feeling. Yet suddenly
she knew that it did .not matter what her motives were: she could not,
could not,
get off the train until the man was reconciled to her doing so,
until this absurd, ugly love story should somehow be concluded.
If
only she could convert him to something,
if
she could say, "Give
up your business, go to Paris, become a Catholic, join the CIO, join the
army, join the Socialist Party, go off to the war in Spain." For a moment
the notion engaged her. It would be wonderful, she thought, to be 3ble to
relate afterwards that she had sent a middle-aged business man to die for
the Republicans at the Alcazar. But almost at once she recognized that
this was too much to hope for. The man back in the compartment was
not equal to it; he was equal to a divorce, to a change of residence, at
most to a change of business, but not to a change of heart. She sighed
slightly, facing the truth about him. His gray flannel dressing-gown lay
on a chair beside her. Very slowly, she wrapped herself in it; the touch
of the material made gooseflesh rise. Something about this garment-the
color, perhaps, or the unsuitable size-reminded her of the bathing suits
one rents at a public swimming pool. She gritted her teeth and pulled
open the door. She did not pause to look about but ·plunged down the
corridor with lowered head; though she passed no one, it seemed to her
that she was running the gauntlet. The compartment, with its naked man
and disordered bed, beckoned her on now, like a home.
When she opened the door, she found the man dressed, the compart–
ment made up, and a white cloth spread on the collapsible table between
the seats. In a few minutes the waiter of the night before was back with
